Winston i'll never understand the "vpn's are useless/dumb besides for a small minority" crowd
The vast majority are owned by a very small number of massively unethical companies. See also...
Johnnyloans Basically 100% of VPN ads are lies.
That is 99.9% true. There exceedingly few VPN's that can be trusted IMO; Azire (just announced a 3rd party audit today, BTW), Mullvad and IVPN are 3 i'm more familiar with. Of those, only Azire and Mullvad physically own their servers (Azire, all - Mullvad, only those in Sweden).
It is true that the vast majority of people would not benefit from a vpn.
Fingerprinting aside, what about ISP's injecting data (ads, etc.) in your stream? Do they not still do this?
I think there's other benefits to a VPN also, such as shifting the point of attack to another IP. They are also essentially required for torrenting and, as you mentioned, defeating geo-fencing. I think there's still some benefit regarding the privacy/anti-FP aspect also, depending on browser configuration (blending in). So you get some benefits at very little cost, possibly less if you run your own server.
The DARK side of VPNs
It turns out that an overwhelming number of VPNs are actively harvesting and selling your data, capturing passwords / credentials / movements from your web activities, and doing all sorts of awful things.